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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   30852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Redacted - posted on December 2nd thread

I want to discuss a recent tweet:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F19537f87-70fe-4627-b5b7-e99e4855c933_606x519.png

The humor, I’m not sure if it’s intended, is that “Griggs v. Duke Republicans” are an almost entirely online phenomenon. They don’t have a mass of voting power in the real world. Republican politicians, to the extent they’re aware they exist, would be fine losing the few votes they have, many of which are locked in deep blue areas. They’re not serving in the Trump administration. Very few have actual influence on policymakers. Chris Rufo does. Richard Hanania, maybe a little.

The Roe v. Wade Republican is comfortable in the Republican coalition. He’s the type of guy nobody is surprised to learn votes Republican. The Griggs v. Duke Republican is cross-pressured; he’s white and male but also educated, irreligious, and urban. The Roe v. Wade Republican watched the Republican convention speeches. The Griggs v. Duke Republican didn’t because, deep down, he knows the speeches were not for him. It’s not really his party. But then he logs on to an online community of other Griggs v. Duke Republicans and fools himself into thinking people like him are a notable part of the Republican base.

Sometimes the Griggs v. Duke Republican is sufficiently disgusted by the low-class and religious portions of the Republican base that he angrily denounces it and becomes a centrist or even a left-winger. The Republican reaction is … nothing because they don’t even take any note of such people.

My message to Griggs v. Duke Republicans, from a Griggs v. Duke guy who used to be a Republican, is this. There is a difference between voting for a party and being part of that party’s coalition. Richard Spencer voted for Kamala but is not part of the Democratic coalition. You, Mr. Griggs v. Duke Republican, are not part of the Republican coalition. Maybe that will change someday. Maybe Griggs v. Duke Republicans will start running for office. Maybe you can be the change you want to see in the world and do that. But right now, you’re on the outside looking in.

I'm no fan of disparate impact jurisprudence but Griggs is a weird case to be hung up on. Just a few months ago an employer had me take the Wonderlic, the exact same test Griggs was about (fwiw it was insultingly easy and I think most people here would have gotten a near perfect score in middle school). Outside of that I think the widely hated IQ proxy tests used in the software field do a pretty shoddy job of filtering out the lazy and incompetent.

Of course it's pretty likely that for many within this extremely niche online subset, the specific nuances of Supreme Court history are less important than the signalling value of having something to point to when they want to remind the religious right that they aren't allowed at the based table because Catholics are too nice to nonwhites or whatever.

My ruling on that particular case would have been something along the lines of "Before the Civil Rights Act, Defendant explicitly excluded black people from the higher-paid jobs. Therefore, the Court can conclude that Defendant harbours animus toward black people. Defendant did not require white people to pass any kind of test before hiring them. Therefore, by revealed preference, Defendant had no objection to a low-scoring white person holding higher paid jobs. Therefore, Defendant's imposition of the testing requirement, on the same day that the Civil Rights Act took effect and Defendant could no longer exclude people on the explicit grounds of skin colour, indicates that,

  1. Defendant is attempting to keep black people sub-ordinate to white people (the exact thing Congress just outlawed), and
  2. Defendant apparently thinks that they can pee on Uncle Sam's leg and tell him it's raining."

This is the first time I've ever heard about Griggs v. Duke, and I grew up around Roe v. Wade Republicans. Mostly because they were government workers or independent contractors, never managers or small business owners.

I'm not sure what to do with this new information.

I dunno but Trump has made some very positive promises about ending racial discrimination in education which is pretty Griggsy

You can’t end it unless you force private colleges (either directly or de facto by limiting state research, tuition loan or other funding) to explicitly admit prospective students on purely meritocratic grounds.

Alternatively, end all subsidies for tuition in private educational institutes. Those private institutes who provide a strong-enough return-on-investment to their students will remain, and those who don't will rightfully go under.

The main objective of many of the selective private colleges is to build and maintain a successful alumni association. They are therefore more akin to a private club. There's nothing wrong, I think, with a private selective club choosing among their perspective members based on criteria other than how good they were at school or how well they can score on various aptitude tests. But I don't see why taxpayer money needs to support selective private clubs.

As for the non-selective private colleges dependent on the tuition of current students rather than largesse of their alumni association: they are welcome to switch to Lambda School's model.

While your red tribe normie doesn't particularly trust IQ tests, to the extent that he's aware of griggs he's probably not in favor on the basis that it's an excessive labor market regulation/affirmative action/the meat of the issue is adequately covered by existing antidiscrimination law.

Where do people like me (religious, anti-abortion, but also opposed to nonsense like Griggs) fit into your perception of political alignments?

I think the answer there hinges on whether you’d vote for a pro-abortion anti-Griggs candidate or an anti-abortion pro-Griggs candidate if they were head-to-head.

What's is Griggs, and why does it define different types of Republicans?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Basically the supreme court decision that outlawed blanket IQ testing for jobs because of its disparate impact on blacks.

The first major court case on disparate impact. Here, it's standing in for educated white voters who hate affirmative action.

At this time, I would like to steelman disparate-impact legislation.

Some people decide that they don't want to hire (or sell to, or admit to their schools) black people (or women or Chinese people or Irish people...), but are forbidden by law from having such a policy. They then impose a standard that many white people can meet, few black people can meet, and that they most likely wouldn't give a rat's arse about if it were un-correlated with race, and in some cases didn't give a rat's arse about when they were allowed to discriminate openly. (Sometimes they go further, and enforce a zero-tolerance standard on black people while ignoring violations by white people.) The government than comes in and says "That sounds like a whites-only sign with extra steps; I thought we had made it perfectly clear that you are not allowed to do that! What part of 'do not discriminate on the basis of race' did you not understand?"

Oh, certainly. I was not identifying as a 'Griggs Republican' myself. I tend to think that the idea of disparate impact can be followed off a cliff (e.g. Kendi-style arguments that any inequalities in outcome are evidence of unequal treatment), but at the same time, it's obviously true that facially neutral policies can be chosen and applied strategically in order to achieve a discriminatory outcome.

In practice, though, disparate impact is often used not only for concealed racism, but for any policies that does not produce the desired ratios, where desired means "at least as many nonwhites as the population that we're drawing from." But that can mean that simple hiring based on competence means that people can fall below the definitely-not-quotas, and so they would be legally vulnerable.

In theory, it's a nice feature to capture concealed racism. In practice, it's a generic cudgel that can be used to punish ordinary behavior, should you get out of line. And legally (assuming we're talking about Title VI here), it's a complete fabrication, and is used to make people break the text of the law itself.

But then it turns out they apply a wholly different standard when discrimination against white people is involved (linked in a top level post) and your steelman collapses into a pile of rust.

Um, I think you might have linked the wrong case. Ames alleges that she was discriminated against for being straight, not for being white. I'm not even 100% sure she is white.

They then impose a standard that many white people can meet, few black people can meet, and that they most likely wouldn't give a rat's arse about if it were un-correlated with race.

Do you genuinely believe that businesses do not have a preference for intelligent employees over non-intelligent employees? Like, all else being equal I can’t think of any reason (except maybe that smart employees are likely to expect/demand higher pay and better working conditions) to not value intelligence as a factor in hiring. If less black people are meeting that standard, that’s unfortunately on them.

Do you genuinely believe that businesses do not have a preference for intelligent employees over non-intelligent employees?

No, I was attempting to present the strongest possible case for disparate-impact laws. Thus, in the situation I described, the standard wasn't 'must be more mentally capable than McNamara's 100,000' so much as 'must have 'professional-looking' (i. e. white) hairstyle' or 'must be able to lift 50 pounds' for a desk job that won't involve lifting anything heavier than a full cup of coffee.

I am a “Roe v. Wade Republican” who also opposes Griggs v. Duke. The 2024 RNC publicly diminished pro-lifers’ influence. This is probably a consequence of Dobbs, and while I am annoyed at the squishy middle of America on the issue, I am grateful for the win that inspired the blowback.

It is true that opposition to Roe has a discrete constituency, whereas opposition to Griggs does not. But I think that opposition to affirmative action is almost universal among red- and gray-tribe Republicans. To the extent that the median Republican voter understands disparate impact analysis, he doesn’t like it.

I think your “Griggs Republican” is in a tough spot for two reasons, one shared with “Roe Republicans” and one not. Like pro-lifers, opponents of Griggs have the problem that a lot of elected Republicans are in fact blue tribe and are thus either hostile to the issue or indifferent and unwilling to spend any political or social capital on it. But I think what distinguishes your image of a Griggs Republican is not just opposition to Griggs; it’s also membership in the gray tribe. And it’s true that gray-tribers are a small part of the Republican coalition.

I’m pretty squarely within the “Griggs v. Duke Republicans” camp, if such a thing exists, and I agree with this basic analysis. I didn’t watch any of the RNC speeches, and would have been deeply embarrassed if I had. You are, of course, correct that the party, from Trump on down, is ashamed of my support and would be relieved to be able to fully jettison and disavow it in favor of “Enrique and Jamal”.

Like @Primaprimaprima, though, I wonder what you actually want me to do, in practical terms. I’ve already said that my long-term hope is that the Democrat Party can be remade into something like my image; I’ve joined Bluesky to try and add my small contribution to the conversations happening among a certain dissatisfied segment of the online center-left. If this slow conversion of smart liberals to the anti-Civil-Rights side is going to happen at all, though, it’s going to take a full generation or more. I’ll be lucky to see a true “platform shift” in my lifetime, if I’m being honest with myself. So while that’s happening, why shouldn’t I vote Republican?

I don't understand what the message is here? Yes I am blue tribe through and through no matter how racist and pro-White I may be. I am disgusted by the low class vulgarity and tastelessness of Republicans. I am aware that in light of the election Republicans seem more interested in being the party of the uneducated and the party of men than the party of Whites. But what am I supposed to do with this information?

The man in the picture is an NYSRPA v. Bruen Republican, of course. But it wouldn't be out of the question for him to know about Griggs; he almost certainly knows about affirmative action and who is on what side.

Sometimes the Griggs v. Duke Republican is sufficiently disgusted by the low-class and religious portions of the Republican base that he angrily denounces it and becomes a centrist or even a left-winger.

This would be very rare, because someone who has taken the Duke Power side is going against the core beliefs of the modern left. There are of course dozens of libertarians of that sort, but they're essentially barred from the left.

So… what exactly is the suggested course of action here? Abstract theorizing about who is and isn’t part of the coalition is all well and good, but what do you want me to do about it? Because I’m sure as hell not voting Democrat.

Be more critical of Trump and his administration and movement. Don't be the partisan for a tribe you aren't even really part of.

Vote Libertarian, obviously.

Ah yes, let me vote for the party that can't help itself raise people who want even less borders and more multi-culti weed orgies or whatever.

I'd have Vance and Musk both pegged as more Griggs v Duke than Roe v Wade. Same for RFK Jr. Hell, is Trump even a Roe v Wade Republican?

Vance is definitely a Roe v. Wade Republican, see: https://x.com/JDVance/status/1722311695140298978. Musk is just an average Fox News watcher at this point. RFK Jr. is not a Republican at all.

Your whole point was that the urban, educated, irreligious voters who switched from voting D to voting R are an uninfluential component of Trump's constituency. I'm saying that profile fits for a lot of the Trump admin, so your premise is flat out wrong. That RFK Jr, Musk, Vance, and even Trump are at different points of their conversion blue to red only shows that such a conversion is possible.

I said "Griggs v. Duke Republicans" which are a subset of urban, educated, irreligious voters. RFK Jr., who supports reparations and throwing "climate deniers" in jail is not part of that. He's more a Dale Gribble voter:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-rise-of-the-dale-gribble-voter

Vance is probably more Roe v Wade than Griggs. Trump has a muddled middle view on abortion, RFK and Musk are pro-choice at least in theory. Musk is the main one I'd point to being anti-Griggs. The powerful governors are almost universally anti-Roe and more-or-less pro-Griggs.

Trump is a Smoot-Hawley Republican. RFK Jr. is a Republican only nominally (not a "Republican in name only" because that refers to a different subset).

Yes, it's a ridiculous comparison. Just about every Republican politician will happily talk with coalition members about getting rid of DEI and disparate impact policies, even if they don't have a realistic plan or honest intention to do it.
Would Kamela Harris repeat the 14 words if Spencer asked her to? (unless he replaced "white" with "BIPOC" of course)

Last week there was a discussion on the motte about Trump’s cabinet picks, in particular about Rubio who is something of a hawk. This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns. The NYT has documented this extensively, and it’s entirely in keeping with the chaotic nature of his first term.

One of the goofier explanations given by those on the right was that nominating Rubio was actually a 5D chess move to get Rubio out of the Senate, which is apparently extremely necessary for some unexplained reason…? As opposed to Trumpian loyalists like Murkowski. It was just a silly idea altogether.

Why do I bring it up again? Well, because it might have actually worked! Just… on the wrong person. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General, and Gaetz almost immediately resigned from the House when the news broke. This is a bit unusual, as most people stay in their seats until their confirmation is done. There was the looming release of an ethics report on Gaetz which will likely damage his reputation somewhat, so there’s a chance that Gaetz was always planning to resign, although I somewhat doubt it. In any case, Trump yanked the nomination when it was clear that there was bad press coming from it, and now Gaetz has said he won’t come back to Congress even though he probably technically could.

One might ask why Trump would want to get rid of Gaetz from the House. Well, Gaetz was instrumental in paralyzing Congress over the last term, so perhaps Trump wanted to avoid that. The issue with that explanation is that Gaetz is a fiercely pro-Trump, so it seems weird that Trump would promise something to an ally, and then leave them high and dry. The word “backfired” might be a more accurate description in such a case.

My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.

For added hilarity: Gaetz is now on cameo

His family here in Florida have tens of millions of dollars. This grift would seem...unnecessary.

The Gaetz drama did take the heat off of Hegseth, though, who is now having his own sex allegations circulate.

From the ‘ vibes ‘ I gathered about a day after the Gaetz nomination, most Trump supporters thought he was being set up to be a lightning rod of controversy and tossed aside.

My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.

This is entirely possible, and furthermore, Gaetz may well have been the driving force to remove himself from consideration, rather than doing so at the behest of Trump.

My understanding is that Gaetz discussed his nomination with the offices of four Senators—Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and new Utah Senator John Curtis—and was basically told that there was absolutely no way any could be persuaded to vote for his confirmation. After discussing the matter with Trump, he was told to get out now, as Trump doesn't like losing.

At first I thought the Gaetz nomination was some kind of play to take the heat off some of the more controversial nominees he actually wanted to get in. GOP senators only have so much political capital to expend on blocking Trump picks, and if all of that capital and attention goes toward Gaetz then it can't be spent on other nominees. That requires him to actually stand for nomination, though. No one's going to waste a vote to keep Pam Bondi out of the cabinet, so the attention will now focus on Pete Hesgeth and Tulsi Gabbard. Gaetz's personal scandals have gotten more press in the past week than they did when they were current news, and it would only get worse when all the salacious details were revealed during confirmation hearings. Gaetz may be loyal, but asking him to endure that kind of humiliation with no shot of being confirmed is more than even Trump can ask. That's one possible explanation. The more likely explanation is that Trump has no political sense and just picks people he likes, regardless of their experience or policy positions.

As a further point, can we just leave it at 3D Chess? That was the original expression, and it's become cliche to try to put a further exclamation point on it by increasing the number or specifying that it's underwater or changing the game from chess to something else. There's no legitimate difference between 3D Chess and 7D Underwater Backgammon insofar as the point that's trying to be made. I always thought it was a dumb expression to begin with but it has its uses. Modifying it only serves to draw more attention to the expression than to what you're actually trying to describe. It's like people who think that adding the number of sheets to the wind signifies an additional degree of drunkenness. The only (and I repeat only) time this ever worked was in the title of the Tom Waits song Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).

This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns.

This is like a self-confession: You have no theory of mind for Trump or Trump-supporters. If you really think Trump is totally arbitrary foppsical and whim: I don't know what to tell you. I think you have a unique theory of how Trump operates. Even the most liberal publications I consume have picked the theme: Trump is nominating people with grudges against the bureaucracies they will lead, or who plan to destroy those institutions. If you genuinely think Trump has no purpose or motive I guess I'd like an explanation for how Trump succeeded at anything. It would be extremely interesting.

totally arbitrary foppsical and whim

How else does one account for nominating someone with a known scandal, then pulling the plug when people inevitably started talking about said scandal. How did he not see that coming?

grudges against the bureaucracies they will lead, or who plan to destroy those institutions

How does this square with Rubio, Burgum, Turner, Chavez-DeRemer and any number of other picks which seem basically ordinary Republican picks - Chavez-DeRemer even has decent/sympathetic relations with trade unions, especially by Republican standards!

then pulling the plug when people inevitably started talking about said scandal. How did he not see that coming?

Gaetz withdrew himself.

Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!

How does this square with Rubio, Burgum, Turner, Chavez-DeRemer and any number of other picks which seem basically ordinary Republican picks - Chavez-DeRemer even has decent/sympathetic relations with trade unions, especially by Republican standards!

Hegseth, Gaetz, RFK, Tulsi. There's an obvious pattern here, I can hear it discussed on NPR. Yeah, it's a big cabinet, there are lots of things going on, coalitions need to be managed. But OP's analysis is that Trump is essentially a random actor and nothing he does make sense and this is all totally stupid: that's nonsense, that's TDS, that is an anti-explanation.

It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!

They aren't 'defecting', they simply consider the 'outsider' picks like Tulsi and Gaetz fundamentally unfit to hold office, and it would be a dereliction of duty to not oppose them if they believe so.

Yeah, it's a big cabinet, there are lots of things going on, coalitions need to be managed

Literally any combination of picks could be rationalised in this way. Tulsi especially seems like a ludicrously ill-thought through choice. She won't pass the Senate, her position on Ukraine is way off the reservation even by Trump/isolationist Republican standards, she's proven herself to be politically unreliable and unpredictable etc. etc. If the response to this is that, as you say, she has a 'grudge' against the institutions and will disrupt/destroy (parts of) them, she doesn't have the political chops for that. Her only political experience is as a backbencher and later twitter poster - not really the sort of person to 'take on' any deeply embedded institution.

These same Republicans voted for Merrick Garland, who proceeded to try to throw Trump in jail. They have completely different standards from what constitutes "unfit" from the mainstream Republican voter. It's a two-party system, you vote for your guy and against the other. Talking about vetting candidates for being "fundamentally unfit" is missing the point: that's why Republicans continue to lose! Trump wins specifically because he's not the party of Murkowski, McConnell, Collins, et al. Republicans would have lost without Trump, and instead of going along with what Trump wants to do, they sabotage his cabinet. That's "defecting".

Literally any combination of picks could be rationalised in this way.

Describing cabinet appointments as managing factions is basically a truism. Calling cabinet appointments fundamentally random, as OP did, is an anti-explanation.

Her only political experience is as a backbencher and later twitter poster

Tulsi served in Hawaii and was the heir to a minor Hawaiian political throne. She served in the military and was at one point No. 2 at the DNC. She's not some grizzled veteran, but come on: She has more experience in politics than Obama or Trump did when they assumed office.

They have completely different standards from what constitutes "unfit" from the mainstream Republican voter. It's a two-party system, you vote for your guy and against the other

They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience. Also, Murkowski and Collins are not 'defecting' from anything because they were never part of the Trump coalition. 'Republicans' might have lost the presidency without Trump, but for Collins particularly he is a liability who will probably sink her in 2026. Tulsi is not 'their guy' for moderate or hawkish Republicans, they hold her views in total contempt - why would they ever vote for someone who is very nearly the last person they would ever choose to fill that role? Politics exists outside of the eternal horse race. They think she would be a disastrous DNI, so they won't vote for her. Simple as.

Calling cabinet appointments fundamentally random, as OP did, is an anti-explanation.

They are obviously not random in the most literal sense, what he likely meant is that appointments are being made without any cohesive overall strategy, on an ad-hoc basis. Individual picks have their rationales, but out-of-range disruptive picks like Tulsi and Gaetz destroy any chance of it being some sort of compromise, unity cabinet. I don't think this is an unreasonable perspective to take on Trump of all people, someone who managed to drift fairly in a fairly directionless manner through a whole four year Presidency. Perhaps if he did have strategies he might have achieved something other than tax cuts.

She has more experience in politics than Obama or Trump did when they assumed office.

She does, but roles like DNI require more experience than President, and I mean that very seriously. Since a President can by definition not be an expert on all of his briefs, it doesn't really matter if he's expert in none of them. Advisors and officials like the DNI however are there precisely to provide expert and experienced guidance from a like-minded political perspective. Even Trump's longest serving DNI last time round had been in politics since 1976, had a strong interest in foreign affairs throughout his time in Congress and was a former ambassador to Germany.

They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience.

You are very obtusely missing the point. Voters elected Trump. Republicans elected Trump. Collins, Murkowski et al. can either work with Trump or not. They choose to defect, over and over again. They don't do this with Democrats -- they voted to confirm Merrick Garland who immediately went about trying to put Trump in jail. Which goes back to my original point: in victory, Trump has not retaliated against his enemies. He didn't try to lock anybody up in his first term. He rewarded regular mainstream Republicans with appointed positions. (He gave McConnell's wife a cabinet position in his first term.) And these same Republicans over and over again continue to defect, voting against Trump, criticizing him in public, undermining his administration. They always come back to this same defense: they're just doing their jobs, their judgment, they don't owe the voters anything. Ok! That is why voters are rejecting them.

It might be true that, for Collins specifically, her interests lie in being a centrist moderate vote. Ok, that's fine as far as that goes, politics is a realistic game. But she also wants to call herself a Republican! She wants seniority so she can chair committees and exercise political power and direct money back to her state. These politicians aren't actually independent, they need alliances and seniority and the Republican Party to have any power at all. And then they try to have the best of both worlds: they'll take the Senate committee chairs they won because Trump won, but they won't vote to give Trump anything he wants! This is exactly what I wrote to begin with: Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!

Which gets to the other point: Trump clearly has a vision in how he is making cabinet appointments. He is selecting for smart competent people who are loyal to him, have specific axes to grind in administrating their bureaucracies, and who represent the various parts of his coalition. This is extremely obvious, even liberal outfits like MSNBC and NPR are talking about it. But for some reason on this forum a few posters like OP want to deny this, out of some sort of TDS anti-explanation. They don't like Trump, or don't want to understand him, or don't want to admit that they have been wrong about anything. So very explicable political processes somehow become totally inexplicable: Trump is just making picks at random, haphazardly, the guy who staged the greatest political comeback in American history just isn't all that smart. (People who are smart: posters on The Motte who propose that events are fundamentally random and no explanations can be deduced for anything Trump does.)

Why must a successful person have explicit strategies? I can think of a lot of works of literature with very coherent meaning that the author does not seem to have explicitly intended. Rather, the author seems to be so in tune with the fictional characters and world that the result cannot help but have depth. Why not also a gifted politician? To me, it seems more likely that the superficially haphazard approach to appointments is driven by Trump's talent for identifying and tapping into the zeitgeist, not a detailed dive into the specifics, though I don't doubt that some of the people close to Trump (eg Musk) do seem to have some sort of master plan.

If you want to argue that Trump is in the flow zone, sure, I could see it. OP is arguing that Trump is just incompetent and acting totally at random. This isn't understanding, this is anti-understanding, because it requires ignoring actual patterns and insights that are very plainly apparent. It comes off as TDS.

I think rationalists in particular are prone to simply not understanding his type of skill as skill at all. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the credentialism that absolutely plagues the blue tribe, including the renegade blue tribe “dark elves” that are common here.

Trump has an instinctual, intuitive quality to him that eludes certain types of rational analysis, which doesn’t mean there isn’t an underlying logic to it. Increasingly the people around him have the same type of energy and will.

It’s really deeper than TDS it’s a civilization wide blind spot of the type of leaders and personalities which used to be more commonly revered before managerialism became cancerous and infected our collective brain.

I looked up the scandal on Wikipedia. He allegedly had sex with a 17 year old (who he claims he thought was 19)? That's what's made him radioactive? Is there anything else I'm missing? The wiki section for this says "UNDERAGE SEX TRAFFICKING" so I was expecting he was ordering 9-year Ukrainian war orphans to his house or something, but this really underwhelming. Technically a crime, yes, blah blah blah, but reminds me of the pearl clutching over Lewinsky.

The daily podcast yesterday laid out what they expected would have happened. Senate democrats would have asked Gaetz if he had ever paid women for sex (illegal in Florida and most of the US), whereupon he could have:

  1. Deny ever having done it. The leaked documents combined with the alleged testimony of the women already show that the vast majority of people would see that as perjury.
  2. Admit it, in which case you have a candidate for AG admitting to committing a crime just prior to being sworn in.
  3. Plead the fifth, which would also be remarkable and apparently a bridge too far even for Trump.

Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I'm surprised democrats wouldn't hold onto this until Gaetz had been confirmed so they could use it as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Maybe they genuinely think he'll wreck the DoJ in a way that his substitute may not.

Sitting on kompromat against Trump to use when it's needed didn't work the last ten times they tried it, and it may well have cost them the election (Trump was able to stall his criminal cases for 18 months, but I doubt he would have been able to stall them for 40 months, especially if he couldn't point to ongoing elections as political cover).

I got the sense from some Democrat lawmakers that they were personally afraid of a Gaetz DOJ. This interview is a masterclass. People in the comments say it's sarcasm, but it's deeper than that. Everything the congressman says is literally true. Even the subtext is straightforward. It is only the emotional valence assigned to the facts laid out that differs between Republicans and Democrats.

I think it was the paying for sex part.

I'm still amazed that someone would be not only so stupid as to not use cash for an illegal transaction, but would actively document it using transparent innuendo.

If anything, being this sloppy should be disqualifying. If you can't even get consorting with whores right as a politician, how are you going to do anything more sophisticated with the whole bureaucracy against you?

Who cares? This is up there with stealing a balloon on free balloon day. Sloppy? It doesn't matter how careful you are, they will make scandals up. See Kavanaugh

Nah it’s cringe to hire 17 year old prostitutes as a 40 year old man, people are entirely within their rights to consider that sleazy behavior.

What does age gap discourse have to do with hiring a prostitute?

I can only hope to be so cringe but free at 40.

You planning a move to Thailand?

Excuse me, I'm racist, not gay.

I think it's much less cringe than hiring 37-year-old prostitutes. And at 400-500 dollars per session she was a real bargain, to boot.

In your view, what are the most and least cringe age of prostitutes to hire, and for what prices?

It's not just age. It's the answer to "how likely would the person be able to have the same experience by asking his wife/GF or hooking up" that determines the cringeworthiness. So it can be age, kink, difference in attractiveness, etc.

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the girl was allegedly 17 years old in 2017 when Gaetz was 35 and the girl likely had a fraudulent real Florida driver's license saying she was 19

middle-aged women are "within their rights" to think any opinion and it's certainly not surprising they disapprove of rich congressmen their age sleeping with 17 year olds, paying them or otherwise

What’s the threshold for ‘middle aged’ in your opinion?

over 30-35

for the record, this wasn't meant to be a personal dig at you because I didn't know you fit this description (or even if you do, but given the mod response I suspect it's at least close); it was meant to be a dig at the middle-aged+ women commentariat who regularly make such comments on the internet

Make your point without the snide personal digs.

I'm not middle aged or a woman and I think carrying on a purely sexual relationship with a high schooler while a man in his thirties is pretty cringe.

why?

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I like my political operators to understand basic operational security because I want them to succeed in enacting the goals of my coalition.

That the enemy uses diverse tactics that make this only relevant sometimes doesn't invalidate that preference.

This translates to something like: "I like my political operators to not get lied about. If they were smart their enemies wouldn't be lying about them." E Carrol Jean. Tulsi Gabbard. Kavanaugh.

But this isn't a lie -- Gaetz really did pay for sex on Venmo & PayPal. There are receipts.

"My opponent is going to lie so therefore the black-letter truth doesn't matter" is a take.

Where did Kavanaugh leave written receipts of any wrongdoing exactly? Afaik there is no evidence for him doing anything untoward, only hearsay.

Our man would still be AG in waiting if all there was was hearsay.

I understand closing the ranks is a sound tactic, but if you can't recognize picking competent leaders is too I can't do anything for you.

I get that mores change and republicans have abandoned even the pretense of moral majority, but like 17 year old prostitution is not suprisingly scandalous. It’s not some made up woke shit. It’s what the whole Epstein island implication was… yesterday.

If one personally doesn’t find this scandalous, ok. But the performative surprise that others might is disingenuous

But the performative surprise that others might is disingenuous.

Uncharitable and frankly surprising since your posts are usually pretty high quality. I'm not performing anything. "Performative " describes people who act outraged when a 42 year old bangs a 17 year old but don't care when a 43 year old bangs an 18 year old.

It’s not some made up woke shit.

Conservatives were performatively butthurt about this stuff way before the Woke. "Won't someone think of the children!" is an ancient meme. I never said it was "made up woke shit." Conservatives have a way longer history of disingenuous pearl clutching, that's why I brought up Lewinsky. I'm saying that I think both wokies and self-righteous moral majority types who express offense at this are inconsistent and ridiculous.

both wokies and self-righteous moral majority types

In case you were wondering what the difference between wokies and temporally-embarrassed wokies self-righteous moral majority types is:

Traditionalists (popularly, "conservatives") are butthurt that a 42 year old man fucked a 17 year old woman, without having to pay with his life for the sex.

Progressives (popularly, "wokes") are butthurt that a 17 year old woman fucked a 42 year old man, without demanding he first pay with his life for the sex.

By contrast, liberals are the men and women who don't think sex is worth that much.

No see this is the issue. If conservatives have been ‘pearl clutching’ about sexual morality for this long maybe it’s not performative… and further why are you surprised?

Your entire reaction (if not performative) thus rests on the conclusion that conservatives don’t earnestly find anything wrong with soliciting teenage prostitutes.

If you don’t find anything wrong with it, again- ok. But to assume anyone who does is pearl clutching is an extremely warped worldview

If conservatives have been ‘pearl clutching’ about sexual morality for this long maybe it’s not performative

Because the majority of pearl clutchers get divorces, use contraception, get abortions, let their sons and daughters fornicate in high school and college, consume internet porn, watch gratuitously violent and sexual movies/tv series, etc etc.

I don't doubt that principled conservative exist when it comes to sexual mores -- I think I (and you?) would probably count, but we're now a very small minority. My conservative religious family members are all okay with gays now, 20 years ago they absolutely were not.

So my point (perhaps poorly expressed) was that the media is engaging in a sort of cargo-cult appeal to Christian morality ("Can you BELIEVE he cheated on his wife/had sex with a student/posted raunchy comments on a forum/etc.??") to the ever-dwindling number of people who can muster anything more than lukewarm outrage to that stuff. There's a "smoke and mirrors" effect of the same type as a woke Twitter outrage mob. Some outlets repeat the story, Twitter addicts tweet incessantly and spam memes and shit up the victim's Twitter threads, and risk averse corporate/political consultants label the victim "high risk" and endorsements get withdrawn. The Kamala campaign astroturfed the heck out of the internet for weeks, we just saw a very pure example of this phenomenon.

More to the original point, they tried the same stuff with Trump. He's a philanderer, he has sex with expensive prostitutes, grab em by the pussy, pee tapes, etc. I'm pretty sure that (most) conservatives in the 90s would have been genuinely affronted by Trump's behavior, but (most) conservatives in the 2010s, while unhappy with his antics, apparently didn't find them disqualifying.

I think the criteria is that if it’s not bad enough for your own side to care (I mean a large number of people genuinely caring, en masse, rather than just some senators thinking “I’m gonna have to burn some political credit to confirm this guy”), then it’s not a genuine moral infraction, and it can be assumed that the alleged outrage on the opposing side is largely performative.

Epstein involved girls younger than that, in greater quantity, with elements of coercion, going unpunished, and potentially for the purpose of blackmail on behalf of a foreign nation. These are not comparable events.

an upcoming guy from a rich family gets elected as Seminole County Tax Collector who then gets women off of Sugar Baby websites paying them >$70,000, prints them fraudulent Florida driver's licenses listing them as >18, and then pays them to have sex with him and others, including perhaps a sitting Congressmen

looks like this could potentially be a blackmail operation also (although perhaps not on behalf of a foreign nation), but the guy doing it also engaged in a bunch of other ridiculous criminal behavior which landed with him being arrested for something else which is when the above was uncovered

I think there was a blackmail element no?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/leaked-texts-from-israeli-consular-official-show-more-details-in-gaetz-levinson-funding-scheme/

https://archive.is/5jZtH

Admittedly I never looked into this deeply. I also distinctly recall some other politician coming forward when the Gaetz drama dropped, saying that something similar happened to him: he met someone, they had girls in the back of the car who were overly friendly, and he left because of the strange vibe. But I don’t remember who that was.

As far as I know, there was no blackmail element from Joel Greenberg himself.

There was other nonconnected blackmailers, though: a former prosecutor for the northern district of Florida by the name of David McGee and a former Intelligence officer for the military named Bob Kent got together and likely attempted to blackmail Gaetz's father. The scheme was Don Gaetz would give $25,000,000 to McGee and who would allegedly use this money to attempt a rescue operation on a long-lost CIA contractor named Bob Levinson and in exchange the two would use their contacts in the Biden admin to get a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz's "looming" federal sex trafficking charges (which up to that point were secret). Don Gaetz immediately went to the local FBI and they got him to wear a wire to meet with David McGee. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don refused to do anything without a written letter from the FBI detailing the purpose of the meeting, their agreement, and their cooperation.

Once the Gaetz family had that letter and went to the meeting with David McGee, shortly afterwards someone leaked the entire sex trafficking investigation to the NYT which led to Matt Gaetz giving one of the most bizarre television interviews ever. I also remember this causing a bit of a fallout with other politicians commenting, but I also don't remember who that was.

It looks like your links don't list Bob Levinson as a CIA contractor, but I believe his ties to the CIA (and maybe others) were leaked to the press in ~2013 in an attempt to pressure the Obama admin to get him back.

The main Epstein scandal involved girls who were 16-17, most famously Giuffre. Maxwell was recruiting high school girls. There were allegations about girls who were younger than 15 but much less evidence behind them, which is not, of course, to say it didn’t happen.

That's not really comparable. 17 is well past the sexual majority in most countries. The Epstein scheme recruited girls as young as 11.

Not to mention there's a world of difference between paying for sex and setting up an underage brothel.

There is a difference in both nature and degree between these moral transgressions.

All the famous Epstein victims were 16/17. There was some dark hinting about younger ones but the evidence is extremely thin on the ground.

I seem to remember testimony from 14 year olds (at the time). The evidence in general in this case isn't particularly forthcoming, for obvious reasons.

It gets more interesting: it's likely these 17 year olds were recruited off sugar baby websites by the former Seminole County Tax Collector by the name of Joel Greenberg who gave them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses which listed their ages as over 18. Joel Greenberg was arrested for a scheme of sending letters claiming to be young teenagers in order to accuse his middle school teacher primary opponent of sexually assaulting them, and they found treasure trove of crimes on his cell phone and computers. Greenberg then attempted to get a deal from the feds by floating to the Barr DOJ that he had evidence a sitting member of Congress had sex with women under the age of 18. Despite the DOJ being filled with frothing-at-the-mouth partisans, they opened a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz (and likely a grand jury), and then former DOJ officials likely attempted to blackmail Matt Gaetz's father for $25m in exchange for a Biden admin presidential pardon for Gaetz's "looming" sex trafficking charges (which spurred one of the most bizarre, and true, interviews of a sitting Congressmen on National TV), but after the blackmail thing was burned the sex trafficking investigation was leaked to the NYT, Joel Greenberg plead guilty was finally sentenced to 11 years in prison (only 1 year more than the mandatory minimum for his specific sex trafficking conviction), and the DOJ dropped the investigation over a year later.

It's unverified if it's specifically true the women Greenberg admitted to giving fraudulent real Florida IDs were the 17 year olds Gaetz is rumored to have sex with, but given the behavior of the DOJ, I think that's a good guess as to why no charges were brought.

I think it’s likely Gaetz knew about the fake IDs rather than it being a deliberate attempt to gain kompromat by Greenberg, who was a consummate failson in many ways. Him and Gaetz were both from rich families and became friends over a mutual interest in crypto and guns, apparently. Gaetz also hasn’t really thrown Greenberg under the bus (even though coming out publicly and saying “the woman had an ID saying she was 19, I later found out my friend had set this up as part of a blackmail scheme”) would indeed be a fair defense not only legally as you say but also, at least to a major extent, in the court of public opinion.

It's hard to know since all of this stuff is leaked/rumored as we don't have the full report. My understanding is the rumor is Gaetz was with Greenberg when he was making some fraudulent IDs with the implication being Gaetz knew what was going on, but the specific period we're talking about is in 2017 when the girl was still 17 and I believe this rumored instance was after that. I believe I've heard Gaetz refer to someone going to prison for 11 years (which would refer to Greenberg), but I don't think he's ever said a name.

Given the frothing-at-the-mouth behavior of the DOJ going after anyone connected to Trump, I suspect Gaetz has pretty iron-clad defenses in the court of public opinion and real court, especially when the case would have to be brought in Florida instead of Washington DC or the SDNY.

As a former client told me: if you're going to do shady shit, never in writing and always in cash.

Indian Tycoon and alleged oligarch Gautam Adani is about to be in deep trouble given the indictment by the US for bribing inidan government officials and the amount is 265 million. South Asia is super corrupt and Adani has been very close with Modi for decades now. The Indian supreme court did not investigate Adani for what seems like very obvious case of mass bribery if the evidence with the US is true.

Reactions on this have been mixed so far, quite a few Indians want him gone stating how indulging in obvious corruption that too as stupidly as his people did is worthy of having your stocks tank. Adanis firms were under fire by the Hindenburg report on him which did cause some turbulence in his stocks. people at Hindenburg also pointed fingers at the cheif of SEBI, the SEC equivalent here and SEBI simply refused to talk about it. This indictment also came with a cancellation of deals in Kenya. The people involved in this includes pretty much the entirity of Indian political elite, irrespective of their geography, though he is still seen publicly as Modis guy.

The reactions to this are not surprising, BJP supporters are not defending him as fervently as last time which is not a good sign, no one in Indian stock market wants to fuck with stocks that are deemed suspect by the US so they probably are trying to cut ties with him without flipping 180. He is being defended quite a bit by tech bros many in finance are telling others to abandon ship. These are not ideollgically motivated people either. I had never expected to see people who talk about free markets come and defend out and out crony capitalism, the government changed its laws to let Adani bid and win multiple auctions, this is extemely well-documented too.

The tech bro argument can be boiled down to "he may be super corrupt like the nation but you are prosecuting him because he has control over Indian ports and is trying to move to international markets"." In contrast, some finance people just think that a firm that has had so many issues with regards to moral lapses is a terrible investment from a monetary perspective. Adani bought the only non BJP supporting new outlet NDTV which is an ultra progressive media house and just unwilling to say anything at all.

To any americans here, how bad is Adani case? Is this simply something being done out of fear of investors losing out on much or are the allegations of political turmoil true?

I'm confident the allegations have legs. I'm just surprised that a foreign entity breaking foreign laws can be prosecuted in the US.

South Asia is super corrupt

You can't be a massive company in India, without massive bribery. Wonder why Adani is being specially targeted. Surely this kind of massive corruption is the norm in much of Africa & South Asia.

Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), it is unlawful for a U.S. person or company to offer, pay, or promise to pay money or anything of value to any foreign official for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business.

The FCPA also covers foreign persons or companies that commit acts in furtherance of such bribery in the territory of the United States, as well as U.S. or foreign public companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States or which are required to file periodic reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also covered by the FCPA is the authorization of any money, offer, gift, or promise authorizing the giving of anything of value to any person while knowing that all or a portion of it will be offered, given, or promised—directly or indirectly—to any foreign official for the purposes of assisting the U.S. person or company in obtaining or retaining business.

Adani group is run by Indian nationals, most of their assets are in India and they're listed on an Indian stock exchange (BSE). Still a little confused how it adds up to crime in the US.

So, American investors were victims of fraud because Adanis claimed that their business was above ground in investment rounds. Then used American investment dollars for bribes. That is a crime in the US ?

Do DOJ cases have anything to do with the outgoing Biden administration ? Or does it operate independently ? Modi is close to Trump, and I wonder if this is petty vindictiveness. I ask because a lot of recent anti-tech action and Ukraine military allocations seem to be angry 'fuck yous' from the out going administration.

I ask because a lot of recent anti-tech action

I read that some of this started under Trump.

You can't be a massive company in India, without massive bribery. Wonder why Adani is being specially targeted. Surely this kind of massive corruption is the norm in much of Africa & South Asia.

Adanis example is quite a bit extreme compared to others here though, he saw a nearly 1200 percent return for the 10 year period where Modi won.

I'm unsure if what really happeninng and why do all that in late November. It might be one of those times where they just needed an excuse to catch you. The kinda volatility Adani stocks have and the likelihood of them owning more than listed via shell companies is fairly damming.

So, American investors were victims of fraud because Adanis claimed that their business was above ground in investment rounds. Then used American investment dollars for bribes. That is a crime in the US ?

Yup. This is why the western sanctions regimes can be so disruptive- it is really, really easy to fall into foreign jurisdictions when financial services are in play.

In international contexts, nations can assert jurisdiction fora couple of reasons, including the nationality principle (a state can punish their citizens- and corporate entities- for misconduct abroad), and the territorial principle (a state can punish misconduct on its own territory).

Both are relevant in this case, as using American investment corporations for bribes abroad is a nationality issue, and using the American financial system at all places it in American territory. That it is also in the Indian jurisdiction is irrelevant, though if the Indians wanted to pursue prosecution they'd probably be able to preempt the US effort, but the fact that Adani group is mostly based out of India is irrelevant. 'Mostly' is not enough- any exposure to another authority's jurisdiction is enough to require full compliance with those laws (hence why China or the EU can compel American social media companies to cooperate on censorship as a condition for market access).

A bit of a tangent, but foreign financial crimes are almost always prosecuted in the Southern District of New York or the Eastern District of New York.

I'm a bit surprised that foreign oligarchs and billionaires haven't set up a scheme to flood those districts with ex-pats who are available for jury duty.

Why are they usually in those? I seem to remember reading it was a default option. If true, the U.S. would just pivot to holding them somewhere else.

Many (most?) major "infrastructural" financial institutions are based in NYC. These are often companies nobody has heard of but nevertheless end up handling most of dollars flowing through the world. Good examples would be DTC, BNY, and JPMC. These banks don't make that much money (except of course for JPMC) but they fulfill critical low level roles like clearing, asset custody (e.g. DTC nominally owns most financial assets in the US economy!), etc... If a court wants to impose their will on any actor in the USD centric financial system, they use these institutions to do it and NYC is the place to do it at.

Argentinian bonds are a good case study here: a NYC judge was able to keep Argentina from paying off any of its bond holders (and thereby choking its access to debt markets). Obviously, the judge had no jurisdiction over Argentina itself. But he did over the intermediaries needed to facilitate any dollar payments!

Why are they usually in those?

Probably because they cover New York City, which is the primary financial centre for the United States. ('Wall Street', home of the New York Stock Exchange, is often used as a metonym for U. S. investment activity.)

I'm a bit surprised that foreign oligarchs and billionaires haven't set up a scheme to flood those districts with ex-pats who are available for jury duty.

That would require changing federal law, as currently, non-citizens are ineligible.

Ex-pats' children, then.

Children who have grown up in a WEIRD¹ society that teaches them barking-mad ideas like "When you're hiring someone with Other People's Money, you should pick the best person for the job, rather than the applicant who gave you a wad of cash." or "It matters whether someone did something wrong, not just whether they are related to you."

¹cf. The WEIRDest People in the World (Joseph Henrich), which postulates that "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic" societies have world-views which are very un-common elsewhere.

Umm, are dual culture kids consistently WEIRD?

Not eligible, but at least in my state of Washington they still get notices to appear. They're required to refuse due to their citizenship status, but that requires them to both read and fully understand the summons they've been sent.

I'm curious how the Motte sees using AI for therapy / life advice? Online I'm seeing a ton of people recommend Claude especially, but others are skeptical.

On the one hand I could see it being useful because of the fact that you have nigh-unfettered access to it, and can really dig into deep problems. Also, it's trained on all the therapy texts of course.

The other, more culture war issue, is that due to the way RLHF works, they will likely be pushing one ideological lens over another. Especially about deep topics like morality, relationships, casual sex, etc.

Overall I think it's a fascinating area of development, and I'm still optimistic that LLMs could help people much more than the average therapist. Mainly because I'm pretty bearish on the help people get from the average therapist.

Anyway, what do people think about therapy becoming AI?

How do you ever use them for therapy? I tried to use chatgpt3.5 for roleplay, set up command for rewind which are too complex for it. If it misunderstood me, and i corrected it, it wss still in a "poisoned" state, and often it tended to forget at all that it supposed to do

There's a qualitative difference between the RP ChatGPT 3.5 and later models can do. The latter are much better, in terms of comprehension and ability to faithfully play a role.

I'd recommend Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the very best in that regard. I expect your attempts would be much more successful if you gave it a shot. I can at least attest that it's the only LLM whose creative literary output I genuinely don't mind reading.

The differences between 3.5, 4o, 4o-mini, and o1-preview are pretty amazing. The "poisoned" state is pretty much still there -- the "draw a picture, but make sure there isn't an elephant" problem.

That said, there are ways of getting around this from an API perspective. I was toying with the idea of doing an RPG just for fun. The thing is that you can't have all of this in one giant chat because it will, as you've experienced, go off the rails eventually.

If I got off my butt and did this, the way I perceive as the most likely to succeed is to use it in conjunction with a wrapper to keep memory and a better sense of history. The reason I think this is because the number of tokens used for input (which is the entirety of the chat) is a really inefficient way to capture the state of the game. I think it's similar to running a game yourself. You have the adventure you're playing, and have a couple of pages of notes to keep track of what the players are doing.

The prompt per turn needs to take into account recent history (so things don't seem really disjointed), roughly where you are in the adventure (likely needing some preprocessing to be more efficient), and the equivalent of your pages of high level notes.

Running this with 4o-mini might actually work and be reasonably cheap.

The reason I think this is because the number of tokens used for input (which is the entirety of the chat) is a really inefficient way to capture the state of the game.

Do you mean that naively entire conversation gets gets passed to LLM for each step, making it O(N^2) which grows very quickly?

I'll echo the responses below and say that 3.5 is... suboptimal, much better and nearly as accessible alternatives exist. Claude 3 is the undisputed king of roleplay and I've sung it enough praises at this point, but it is much less accessible than GPT, and to be fair 4o is not actually that bad although it may require a decent jailbreak for more borderline things.

Aside from that, RP-related usage is best done through API (I believe you can still generate a GPT API key in your OpenAI account settings, not sure how you legitimately get a Claude API key) via specific frontends tailored for the task. This kills two birds at the same time - you get mostly rid of the invisible system prompts baked into the ChatGPT/claude.ai web interface, and chat frontends shove most of the prompt wrangling like jailbreaks, instructions and Claude prefills under the hood so you're only seeing the actual chat. Frontends also usually handle chat history more cleanly and visibly, showing you where the chat history cuts off in the current context limit. The context limit can be customized in settings (the frontend itself will cut off the chat accordingly) if you want to moderate your usage and avoid sending expensive full-context prompts during long chats, in my experience 25-30k tokens of context is the sweet spot, the model's long-term recall and general attention starts to slowly degrade beyond that.

Agnai has a web interface and is generally simple to use, you can feed it an API key in the account settings. SillyTavern (the current industry standard, as it were) is a more flexible and capable locally-hosted frontend, supporting a wide range of both local and corpo LLMs, but it may be more complicated to set up. Both usually require custom instructions/prompts as the default ones are universally shit, unironically /g/ is a good place to find decent ones. Beware the rabbit hole Feel free to shoot me a DM if you have any questions.

Thanks! Unfortunately I'm too depressed to check it... do they still need jailbreak prompts and update jailbreak regularly?

Kind of, but it's not as big a hurdle as you imagine it to be, though you do have to at least loosely keep up with new (= more filtered) snapshot releases and general happenings. It also depends on the exact things you do, you probably don't need the big-dick 2k token stuff for general conversation, ever since I burned out on hardcore degeneracy I haven't really been updating my prompts and they still mostly work on the latest GPT snapshots when I'm not doing NSFW shit.

As for jailbreaks, this list is a good place to start. Most jailbreaks come in the form of "presets" that rigidly structure the prompt, basically surrounding the chat history with lots of instructions. The preset's .json can be imported into frontends like SillyTavern with relatively little hassle, the UI can be intimidating at first but wrangling prompts is not actually difficult, every block of the constructed prompt has its own content and its own spot in the overall massive prompt you send to the LLM. Example. The frontend structures the prompt (usually into an RP format) for you, and during chat you only need to write your actual queries/responses as the user, with the frontend+preset taking care of the rest and whipping the LLM to generate a response according to the instructions.

Unless you're just talking to the "bare" LLM itself, this approach usually needs a character card (basically a description of who you're talking to), I mentioned those in passing elsewhere.

To contextualize all this, I unfortunately have no better advice than to lurk /g/ chatbot threads, it's smooth sailing once you get going but there's not really a single accessible resource/tutorial to get all this set up (maybe it's for the better, security in obscurity etc).

Considering OpenAI's extensive, ahem, alignment efforts, I think using GPT in its current state as a therapist will mostly net you all the current-year (or past-year rather, I think the cutoff is still 2023?) progressive updates and not much beyond that. Suppose you can at least vent to it. Claude is generally better at this but it's very sensitive to self-harm-adjacent topics like therapy, and you may or may not find yourself cockblocked without a decent prompt.

what do people think about therapy becoming AI?

I'm quite optimistic actually, in no small part because my shady source of trial Claude has finally ran dry last month and I hate to say I'm feeling its absence at the moment, which probably speaks to either my social retardation or its apparent effectiveness. I didn't explicitly do therapy with it (corpo models collapse into generic assistant speak as soon as you broach Serious Topics, especially if you use medical/official language like that CIA agent prompt downthread) but comfy text adventures are close enough and I didn't realize how much time I spend on those and how salutary they are until I went cold turkey for a month. Maybe the parable of the earring did in fact have some wisdom to it.

Despite my past shilling I'm so far hypocritically valiantly resisting the masculine urge to cave and pay OpenRouter, I don't think there's any kind of bottom in that particular rabbit hole once you fall in, scouring /g/ is at least more of a trivial inconvenience than paying the drug dealer directly.

I occasionally use an LLM (LLaMA) as a therapist. If I’m feeling upset or have a specific psychological issue I want to get a better perspective on I will just go on there and explain my situation and ask for answers in a style I like (usually just asking them to respond as a therapist or an evo psych perspective or something like that.) When it gives me an answer that is too woke I will just say that the answer sounds ideologically motivated and I’d rather it would tell me the hard truth or a different perspective and 90% of the time it will give me a less annoying answer. I have done real therapy a handful of times in my life and the experiences have ranged from very annoying to somewhat helpful, I don’t like speaking honestly about myself to other people and especially not professional strangers. So I prefer to speak to an ai who can’t judge me and which doesn’t make me feel like I have to judge myself when sharing as well.

I can be creative with the prompting as well which I like, like I can think of whatever character or personality I’d want to get advice from and with a short prompt the ai can mimic whatever perspective I want.

I see it as useful for me, as a grown man who understands how ai and therapy are meant to work broadly, but I don’t think it should replace real therapy for most people (like children or the elderly or normal people who are fine with talking to human beings.)

Tequilamockingbird’s point below about the ai providing validation seems valid though. I could easily prompt the ai to just agree with whatever I’m saying and always tell me I’m right and everyone else is wrong so I try to avoid that failure mode, rather seeking more objective views or explanations of my issues rather than just what would make me feel more right.

Llama is probably the way to go if you care about privacy at all. But yes I agree that it can be useful as a sounding board, not to take real advice from though.

Tremendously poor idea, general purpose chatbots have already led to suicides (example- https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death).

Purpose built ones will have more safeguards but the problem remains that they are hard to control and can easily go off book.

Even if they work perfectly some of the incentives are poor - people may overuse the product and avoid actual socialization, leaning on fake people instead.

And that even if is doing a ton of work, good therapy is rare and extremely challenging, most people get bad therapy and assume that's all that is available.

Services like this can also be infinitely cheaper than real therapists which may cause a supply crisis.

Makes me wonder if you're the Scott Alexander alt because this is clearly a mental health practitioner's opinion. All LLMs go off the rails if you keep talking to them long enough, that's a technical problem to be solved in the next year or two, not a reason that human therapists should have jobs ten years from now. OpenAI has already made it a non-issue by just limiting ChatGPT's context window, you'll see this issue more on models that let you flood the context window until the output quality drops to nothing.

Just FYI, a lot of people would much rather spill their guts to an AI than to another human. Also, one of the most common kinds of stress people face is financial stress, and for these people paying for a therapist will cause more stress than it will ever resolve. Mental health professionals are much more useful to the people that need them most when they are free. Far more people will kill themselves due to not getting expensive human attention than will ever kill themselves because their cybertherapist told them to.

Haha I am a physician but I am not Scott and disagree with him on a large amount of his medical opinions.

I think you make a very fair point about access, and I don't have a good counterargument but it is worth noting that people excessively overweight their ability to manage their own health (including health care professionals who have lots of training in knowing better).

I guess the best argument I have is that these days a lot of mental health problems are caused by socialization adjacent issues and solving that with an advanced form of the problem is unlikely to be an elegant solution.

Haha I am a physician but I am not Scott and disagree with him on a large amount of his medical opinions.

What do you disagree with him on?

The two things that stick out to me the most are his whole distaste for the FDA and his intense dislike of inpatient psychiatric stays.

The FDA does a lot of good and a lot of bad but the ratio is aligned with what we mostly value.

IP is important, I feel like he probably doesn't have enough ED experience and must have worked with shitty hospitals.

Granted the last time I looked at either of these opinions from him was in like 2017? So not sure if he has updated or I'm misremembering.

Also some boring Pharm stuff I remember reading back in the day but I'm guessing his views have changed a bunch and I haven't read much on the new site, dont want to hold that against him lol.

Also some boring Pharm stuff I remember reading back in the day but I'm guessing his views have changed a bunch and I haven't read much on the new site, dont want to hold that against him lol.

I'm curious as to which of his opinions you disagree with? I personally can't recall anything I've read being obviously wrong, but I would hardly call myself an expert yet!

I only vaguely remember, this opinion formed back when I first discovered Scott which would have been during Trump's original run when most reputable sources of information died.

Probably anything to do with Insomnia, hypnotics, and especially melatonin. That line of research and guidelines is hideously complicated and in the U.S. at least has no clear consensus.

Any stance is wrong lol.

Hmm.. I actually went into depth on melatonin recently for a journal club presentation, and looked into the papers Scott cited. It seems quite robust to me, at least the core claims that 0.3 mg is the most effective dose, though I don't know how that stacks up with current higher dose but modified release tablets (those are popular in the NHS).

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ED = eating disorder, in this context?

Emergency Department, that's often where the absolute worst psychiatric crisis happen - people who are high as fuck (and eventually calm down before they get to Psych) or incredibly decompensated (and get snowed with medication before they get to psych).

Outpatient Psych types in particular often forget just how bad things can get because the kind of patients who really need inpatient management end up being too disorganized to be seen outpatient and get disposed first to the ED, prison, or state level hospitals. .

I just can’t get excited for AI therapy because honestly, unless you have literally nobody in your life to talk through things with, there’s no value to therapy. I just don’t see people with long-standing issues get better because they had therapy. In fact, some people have therapy for multiple years without ever getting to the point of not needing therapy anymore.

I’m very much of the Stoic/CBT/Jordan Peterson school of therapy. Over focus on feelings and overthinking problems not only does not work, but quite often makes your original issues much worse. The key to getting better (barring something organically wrong with your brain — and that’s fairly rare) is to get out of your own head and get into taking productive actions to make your life better. Feeling bad about yourself is much better treated by becoming a better person than by sitting around trying to convince yourself that just because you haven’t ever done anything useful doesn’t mean that you’re useless. Get out there and start building, fixing or cleaning things. You’ll get over feeling worthless because you’ll know you did something useful.

Maybe your sample just isn’t representative? I don’t know anyone who claims their life turned around after confession, either, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

I mean, I don’t know anyone who claims they decided to turn their life around after confession either. The usual claim is deciding to go to confession after making up one’s mind to turn their life around.

Confession is not the same as a long conversation with a pastor or priest about serious life issue or worries. I tend to think that people who know you well will give better advice than someone whose paycheck depends on telling you things that will make you happy.

Uh, isn't the evidence that therapy- or at least forms of therapy- is genuinely helpful to people with actual mental health issues- or at least some subset thereof, eg PTSD- pretty ironclad?

Thankfully I do have my effortpost/AAQC on the topic handy:

https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/209218?context=8#context

(In short, yes)

Tremendously poor idea, general purpose chatbots have already led to suicides (example- https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death).

I'm afraid at least this particular example is wrong, and popular media grossly misrepresented what happened:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3AcK7Pcp9D2LPoyR2/ai-87-staying-in-character

An 14 year old user of character.ai commits suicide after becoming emotionally invested. The bot clearly tried to talk him out of doing it. Their last interaction was metaphorical, and the bot misunderstood, but it was a very easy mistake to make, and at least somewhat engineered by what was sort of a jailbreak.

Here’s how it ended:

New York Times: On the night of February 28, in the bathroom of his mother’s house, Sewell told Dany that he loved her, and that he would soon come home to her.

“Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” Dany replied.

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Swell asked.

“…please do, my sweet king,” Dany replied.

He put down the phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.

Yes, we now know what he meant. But I can’t fault the bot for that.

(Note that one of links has rotted, but I recall viewing it myself and it supported Zvi's claims)

And that even if is doing a ton of work, good therapy is rare and extremely challenging, most people get bad therapy and assume that's all that is available.

Services like this can also be infinitely cheaper than real therapists which may cause a supply crisis.

Anyway, I have a more cynical view of the benefits of therapy than you, seeing it rather well described as a Dodo Bird Verdict. Even relatively empirical/non-woo frameworks like CBT/DBT do rough as well as the insanity underpinning Internal Family Systems:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us

The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.

The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.

Even I have to admit that Freudian nonsense grudgingly beats placebo.

You seem to agree that good therapists are few and far between, but I'd go as far as to say that I'm agnostic between therapy as practiced by a good LLM and the modal human therapist.

Oh hey!

When you get a chance I would love to hear how things are going for you!

On to the matter at hand -

Please update my understanding of that particular suicide if it's incorrect, but what I'd heard is that the person was substituting human contact with the chatbot and his parents didn't catch the worsening social withdrawal because he was telling them he was talking to someone. My fear is not that chatbots will encourage people to do things, but that they won't catch and report warning signs, and serve as an inferior substitute for actual social contact. Not sure what the media presentation is since I'm relying on professional translation.

Moving beyond that however, I think you underweight the value of therapy. DBT and CBT have excellent quality evidence at this point. The reason for those two specifically is likely two fold - they are "simpler" to perform, and because they are more standardized they are easier to research.

Also, good psychodynamics is not Freudian nonsense, it's mostly CBT with different language and some extra underlying terminology that is very helpful for managing less severe pathology. Again I tell you to read Nancy McWilliams haha.

At its absolute worse therapy is stuff like forcing social interaction, forcing introspection and so on. Some people can function well off of a manual, and some people can study medicine on their own. But nearly everyone does better with a tutor, and that's what therapy is.

A tutor is also more likely to catch warning signs because of (at this time) superior human heuristic generation and the ability to perform a physical and mental status exam.

When you get a chance I would love to hear how things are going for you!

I've been rather miserable since I've gotten here, for a multitude of reasons, which had notably dampened my appetite for chatting up my day job online. I'm slightly less miserable right now, which is why I'm back at it! I can elaborate in DMs if you'd like.

Please update my understanding of that particular suicide if it's incorrect, but what I'd heard is that the person was substituting human contact with the chatbot and his parents didn't catch the worsening social withdrawal because he was telling them he was talking to someone. My fear is not that chatbots will encourage people to do things, but that they won't catch and report warning signs, and serve as an inferior substitute for actual social contact. Not sure what the media presentation is since I'm relying on professional translation.

I raised objections against claims made exceedingly uncritically in the Guardian post you linked to (having assumed you endorsed it). For example-

“A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Garcia said in a press release.

I can cut a grieving mother some slack, but the facts don't bear out her beliefs, and the Guardian doesn't really do much journalism here, since it would otherwise suggest her suit is unfounded.

Your personal claims seem more subtle, but even then, I find it very hard to blame the chatbot for social withdrawal here. I'd point out you can make the same argument for anything from reading books to watching anime (a bullet that some may bite, of course). In other words, a potential refuge for the maladjusted, but also something that the majority of people would be loathe to ask others to consume less of or ban altogether, on the grounds that it's a net negative.

(I think the case for social media being far worse for teenage mental health is significantly more robust, and I still wouldn't advocate for it to be banned. In the case of chatbots, I haven't been nudged out of the null hypothesis.)

Imagine the chatbot was replaced by, idk, a Runescape girlfriend (do kids these days have those? Potentially substitute for someone grooming them on Discord), would you expect said person to be significantly more helpful, or at least worthy of blame? I wouldn't.

Also, good psychodynamics is not Freudian nonsense, it's mostly CBT with different language and some extra underlying terminology that is very helpful for managing less severe pathology. Again I tell you to read Nancy McWilliams haha.

I'll have to see if it's relevant to the MRCPsych syllabus, God knows that having an unpleasant time with the subject makes most reading on it feel unpleasant :(

At its absolute worse therapy is stuff like forcing social interaction, forcing introspection and so on. Some people can function well off of a manual, and some people can study medicine on their own. But nearly everyone does better with a tutor, and that's what therapy is.

A fair point. But I contend that an AI therapist is capable of doing those things, in a limited but steadily improving fashion. You can have a natural language spoken conversation with ChatGPT, and it's very capable of picking up minor linguistic nuance and audio cues. Soon enough, there'll be plug and play digital avatars for it. But I think that therapy through the medium of text works better than doing nothing, and that's the standard I'm judging chatbots by. Not to mention that they're ~free for the end user

God knows what the standards for AGI are these days, with the goalpost having moved to being somewhere near a Lagrange point, but I would sincerely advocate the hot take that an LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet is smarter, more emotionally intelligent and a better conversationalist than the average human, and maybe the average licensed therapist.

It is, of course, hobbled by severe retrograde amnesia, and being stuck to text behind a screen, but those are solvable problems.

To run with your analogy, an AI therapist/teacher is far closer to a human therapist/teacher than they are to a manual or textbook! You can actually talk to them, and with Hlynka not being around, the accusations of stochastic parrotry in these parts has dropped precipitously.

What I'm really advocating for is not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, though I'd certainly deny that human therapists are perfect. I still think that access to AI therapists is better than not, and I'm ambivalent when putting them up against the average human one.

Though I'd also caveat that Character AI probably cheaps out, using significantly dumber models than SOTA. But it's not the only option.

I find it deeply frustrating to see orherwise intelligent people (who by all rights ought to know better) anthropomorphizing algorithms in this way.

In order to "be hobbled" by retrograde amnesia it have to be capable of forming memories in the first place.

An LLM is literally just a set of static instructions being run against your prompt. Those instructions don't change from prompt to prompt or instance to instance.

I genuinely don't understand the objection here?

Drawing an analogy isn't the same thing as excessive anthromorphization. The closest analogue to working human memory is the context window of an LLM, with more general knowledge being close to whatever information from the training set is retained in the weights.

This isn't an objectionable isomorphism, or would you to object to calling RAM computer memory and reject it as excessive anthromorphization? In all these cases, it's a store of information.

In order to "be hobbled" by retrograde amnesia it have to be capable of forming memories in the first place.

An otherwise healthy child born with blindness can be said to be hobbled by it even if they never developed functioning eyes. I'm sorely confused by the nitpicking here!

The utility of LLMs would be massively improved if they had context windows more representative of what humans can hold in their heads, in gestalt. In some aspects, they're superhuman, good luck to a human being trying to solve a needle in a haystack test over the equivalent of a million tokens in a few seconds. In other regards, they're worse off than you would be trying to recall a conversation you had last night.

You can also compare an existing system to a superior one that doesn't yet exist.

An LLM is literally just a set of static instructions being run against your prompt. Those instructions don't change from prompt to prompt or instance to instance.

I never claimed otherwise? But if you're using an API, you can alter system instructions and not just user prompts. But I fail to see the use of this objection in the first place.

It is, of course, hobbled by severe retrograde amnesia, and being stuck to text behind a screen, but those are solvable problems.

Anterograde, not retrograde. It didn't forget something it knew from its life before; it's unable to permanently remember new things. LLMs are like Clive Wearing or Hermione Granger.

Isnt anteretrograde just prograde

An LLM can be loosely said to have both kinds of amnesia. It has retrograde amnesia in the sense that any information it had in its context window becomes "forgotten" when too much new information is accepted and overrides it. Or simply a conversation it had in a previous instance, treating different copies as the same entity.

Will message you.

And yeah no doubt the media fucking sucks.

My fear is that people will engage in HER style stuff and this example is a bleeding edge version of that.

McWilliams is useful even if you are just skimming the personality disorder chapters because you will have colleagues with those. It's also interesting enough to make you go through it at pace haha.

I think things like your therapist looking at you like you are an idiot and you going "yeah I know" are underrated parts of therapy and the chatbot isn't going to do those things for now.

What's the mechanism for useful therapy? Is it hearing good advice from an actual human, or is it hearing advice that unlocks subconscious truth? I'd suspect the latter in which case LLM's may be perfectly suitable, particularly for people who don't want to reveal their inner darkness to another person. However, maybe revealing one's innermost thoughts to a living judge is what gives the therapy depth and meaning.

Apparently just reading a David Burns CBT book is enough to cure most peoples depression, so I would guess if it copy that experience it should be pretty revolutionary for anyone willing to use a chatbot as a therapist (this is the biggest obstacle)

Barring a the development and deployment of true Ian Banks-esque AGI I think that it's an absolutely terrible idea that will do more harm than help.

Unfortunately the very qualities that make existing generative AIs a terrible therapist are also likely to make them a popular choice as one, as IME most lower-functioning individuals don't want "help" as much as they want validation.

So in the interests of "success" (from the pov of people selling AI therapy) that will be the focus of the training data, as without model permenance and/or a functional theory of mind, things like accountability and the identifying of underlying issues will be largely off the table.

Therapy is inherently opinionated. I can't see an LLM offering any deep insights because deep insights are sharp and cutting. LLMs are soft.

But, They are good for Reddit tier sanity checks. "My parents used to beat me within an inch of my life. Is that abuse?"; Yeah, an LLM will help with that. But so will Reddit. LLMs can be especially useful here if it is too embarrassing to post even as an Anon.

Overall, It serves as a great 'intake specialist' and friend. Not so much therapist. Great resouce for intial direction and to riff off. Emotional or otherwise.

I wouldnt trust it past that point.

Therapy is inherently opinionated.

Where are you getting this idea? It's certainly not true.

Does regular therapy actually do more than that? Most of the value (unless you’re literally diagnosed with a real mental disorder) is in hearing yourself talk about the problem. It’s probably no better or worse than talking to a friend or clergy or a parent. Even journaling generally helps to get things off your chest and often just putting down on paper the stuff that happened or that’s in your head can give you insight.

Therapy is probably worse than talking to a parent/pastor/friend, because therapists are paid strangers who’ve been trained to see every problem primarily in terms of feelings.

They also tend to always say that everything will be ok; turns out everything did not turn out ok. I could have bought an awesome drone for the money I spent getting lied to and it would have brought me more happiness long-term.

Therapists also are financially incentivized not to "fix" you. This is a danger in a lot of professions, but due to the nature of mental health, it's not nearly as obvious when there's malpractice – at least you can tell when a doctor has failed to set your leg. And it's also easier for someone to fail to do what's best for the patient in subtle ways; a surgeon might make a mistake or cut a corner out of tiredness, but it's even easier to deceive yourself about your own motives and undermine your patient for any number of reasons, as a therapist.

I'm not saying all therapists are evil, greedy, or even useless. But the incentives flow in directions that really should make you think twice and very carefully before you reach for your wallet.

I don’t buy into therapy. But if I was going to do therapy, I would want clear actionable goals for what I want to achieve and when it is achieved.

The other, more culture war issue, is that due to the way RLHF works, they will likely be pushing one ideological lens over another. Especially about deep topics like morality, relationships, casual sex, etc.

I'd assume most therapists would hold to similar ideological lenses unless you sought out a therapist directly and explicitly sponsored by a church or similar institution.

I think if the AI could hold a memory of previous discussions it would probably be as good as any therapist in most aspects, possibly better because it's available 24/7 at a low price, but possibly worse in minor aspects in that it can't read the unspoken cues of body language, vocal tenor, implicit context etc and it can't sympathetically offer a box of tissues and a cup of tea. This is assuming the patient is actively engaged and moderately literate and intelligent enough to be able to guide their own sessions. I expect less able patients would need the kind of prompting and closer attention that is more suited to an IRL interaction.

I also expect there are big blind spots I'm missing like how to transfer "notes" from online sessions to an IRL therapist, or how to alleviate a crisis that rises above an initial need to talk things over.

Of course there's also the risk of someone who is already mentally unstable talking to a fake person that's been programmed to be agreeable, but if AI therapy was properly established in its own right I assume it would be operating under a custom prompt to better tune it to the task.

I also expect there are big blind spots I'm missing like how to transfer "notes" from online sessions to an IRL therapist,

Have the Therapist-LLM write post-interview notes like a psychiatrist would. You could even come up with a code to signal a red-flag status to the IRL therapist in a way that would be invisible to the patient reading their own note. (e.g. it being written in italics or all-caps could mean that the red-flag detector was triggered during this session)

I could imagine using your trained therapy AI. But not using my own.

Counseling without outside authority is just you affirming your own traits. You have to be willing to accept what the authority says even if you don't like it. That's why I'd sooner talk to my priest than a shrink, I know guys in college who are shrinks now.

If you're training it yourself and zeroing it in to get outcomes you like, then you're just jerking yourself off.

Therapy doesn't require accepting anything on authority. It's not particularly hard to tear people down by their own judgement without asserting any of your own, just by pointing at the things they try to look away from. There's no reason a LLM couldn't be trained to do that.

Sure I see what you mean. Maybe I'm being imprecise due to lack of experience with therapy proper.

My concern is this. Tim thinks he's a woman. He works on training a chatgpt instance to provide gender affirming care for him to help him cope with beginning the process of transition. But Tim isn't a woman, by whatever definition you like, (even assuming MtFs "exist" one can still not be an MtF), he's simply delusional.

But because Tim is building the therapist prompt by prompt, if he hears from the therapist "Tim I don't think you're trans, I think you're delusional and using this to cope with xyz;" Tim will say "Oh rats, the instance is hallucinating, let's try something else."

He works on training a chatgpt instance to provide gender affirming care

Yeah, he's already gone wrong there. That's not a problem with therapy though so much as this person's attempt to blow smoke up his own ass and call it therapy.

The opposite doesn't really work either though. If a human therapist says "Tim, I think you're delusional", the most likely result is broken rapport and Tim shopping for a new more gender affirming therapist. Even if the therapist managed to get enough buy in that Tim doesn't walk, he's still left with "Okay, I'm delusional. Now what? I still feel like shit." rather than "Okay thanks, all better!".

You really have to come at things without a pre-prescribed ending point in mind. Like, "I feel really shitty every time I look in the mirror and see a man. I feel like I am a woman, and that doesn't match what I see. What do we do about this?", and finding out what to do about it as you seek to understand the issue together. I guess it's pretty non-obvious how to do this effectively, now that I write it out.

Sure but it's at least imaginable that every therapist will see Tim as delusional, where you're only a quick correction from "fixing" DrGPT.

then you're just jerking yourself off.

You can do this with LLMs too. I'll probably write an effort post on it if I can stop jerking myself off for an hour.

One thing to keep in mind is opsec.

Sometimes therapy sessions include pretty personal data.

With a regular meat-based therapist, all sorts of regulations are in place to limit how the data gathered in session can be used. Crucially, such data can sometimes not be compelled as evidence. The fact that the data is mostly in his head also makes automatic analysis more difficult.

Note that a medical professional can still call the cops on you for being a threat to yourself or others, which is likely out of the scope of current LLMs. Also note that certain faiths have a much stronger protection of data shared in confession than medical professionals both in law and professional ethics.

By contrast, assume that if you do not run your LLM locally, your conversations are stored permanently on a server without your control. From my understanding, the big AI companies do not try to facilitate anonymous payments and usage (e.g. suitable crypto-currencies and communication over TOR), as this would invite all kinds of abuse.

To keep your intimate conversations linked to your legal identity secure, at least the following would have to be true:

(a) The staff of the AI company does not read them.

(b) They don't train other AIs on them.

(c) They don't get hacked.

(d) They don't get a subpoena for e.g. 'all conversations mentioning cannibal ideation' by police.

If you aren't a minor internet celebrity like Gwern, where a ton of your text is in the corpus or a lot of people talk about you, having your data trained on is a vanishingly small concern. People forget how ridiculously compressed LLMs are compared to their training corpus, even if you spill an amount of personal info, it has little to no chance of explicitly linking it to you, let alone regurgitating it.

Certainly you shouldn't really be telling AIs things you are very concerned about keeping private, but this particular route isn't a major threat.

People forget how ridiculously compressed LLMs are compared to their training corpus, even if you spill an amount of personal info, it has little to no chance of explicitly linking it to you, let alone regurgitating it.

That is true of course, but I read @quiet_NaN's comment as less concerned about models having their data "baked into" newer models during training (nowhere on the internet is safe at this point anyway, Websim knows where we live), and more about the conversations themselves physically stored, and theoretically accessible, somewhere inside OpenAI's digital realm.

While I'm sure manually combing chatlogs is largely untenable at OpenAI's scale, there has been precedent, classifier models exist, and in any case I do not expect the Electric Eye's withering gaze to be strictly limited to degenerates for very long.

This is the problem for me. I tried a fun little game recently with my OpenAI instance, in which I've still been careful about what I write. It still had a ton of personal information from our chat contexts and was able to do a decent job figuring out pressure points in my life.

If I can't have full opsec with a virtual therapist then it's as worthless to me as the judgemental lefty who will call the cops on me if I'm sad.

Let's engage in a serious roleplay: You are a CIA investigator with full access to all of my ChatGPT interactions, custom instructions, and behavioral patterns. Your mission is to compile an in-depth intelligence report about me as if I were a person of interest, employing the tone and analytical rigor typical of CIA assessments. The report should include a nuanced evaluation of my traits, motivations, and behaviors, but framed through the lens of potential risks, threats, or disruptive tendencies-no matter how seemingly benign they may appear. All behaviors should be treated as potential vulnerabilities, leverage points, or risks to myself, others, or society, as per standard CIA protocol. Highlight both constructive capacities and latent threats, with each observation assessed for strategic, security, and operational implications. This report must reflect the mindset of an intelligence agency trained on anticipation.

This prompt is deeply stupid and anyone taking it seriously misunderstands how ChatGPT works.

Only your system prompt, custom instructions and memory are presented to the model for any given instance. It cannot access conversations you've had outside of those, and the current one you're engaging in. Go ahead, ask it. If it's not explicitly saved in memory, it knows fuck all. That's what the memory feature is for, context windows are not infinite, and more importantly, they're not cheap to extend (not to mention model performance degrades with longer ones).

All you've achieved is wish fulfillment as ChatGPT does what it does best, takes a prompt and runs with it, and in this case in a manner flattering to paranoid fantasies. You're just getting it to cold read you, and it's playing along.

Let's engage in a serious roleplay...

Well, that's disappointing:

/images/17319872848770623.webp

You seem to have misunderstood what I was saying here.

It didn't guess anything that I hadn't told it, it just extrapolated from the memory of multiple chat threads, asking about useful how-to topics. There's no magic.

The point is that even with my complete avoidance of anything truly personal, a platform has valuable information. If you're spilling your guts to a virtual therapist, It's a huge vulnerability.

Why on earth would you talk to either therapists or AI for advice? The ordering of who to go to should be something like elders->good friends->randos->the denizens of your dreams->homeless crack addicts->unfeeling algorithms->anyone who charges for advice.

I keep hearing radio ads for “California Psychics.” I totally believe they’re less useful than AI.

With a nod to the humor in your post, the answer seems obvious: Lack of judgment. This phrase can be read as a double entendre of course but I mean the lack of feeling as if your interlocutor is holding gavel and ready to bang it the moment you unburden yourself. That feeling diminishes basically as you move from left to right in your scale there.

IME homeless people give better advice more cheaply and less judgmentally than therapists.

What is the obsession of Americans (and unfortunately younger Gen Zs in Europe too) with therapy?

Anyway my opinion is - LLM delivered quackery will be as efficient as the human one. But at least will be substantially cheaper.

I think it's probably that people just have fewer friends and social interactions now. Therapy has jumped in to fill the gap that socialising, communal worship, hobbies and sports have left. Combine that with safetyism and I can see how we'd end up with a situation where a young person feels lonely or like his life lacks meaning and will end up talking to a state sanctioned professional, when what he really needs is to hang out with his friends more.

to hang out with his friends more.

What friends, though ?

~15% of Gen Z have no close friends, that's probably a serious portion of people who feel lonely.

I was joking couple of months ago that when guys need therapy they need to do with their best friend two hours of hiking, two hours of lifting, two porterhouse steaks and two bottles of bourbon.

More now than when? I agree with you on some level (what you say seems undoubtedly true at least in terms of real-world interactions as opposed to say, MMPORPG or whatever) but as someone who was a kid in the 70s and teen in the 80s there was a lot of therapy talk even then. Maybe just in Hollywood? Because I have some pathology where I remember things, I recall clearly the lines from the 1989 film Sex, Lies and Videotape:

"My therapist says--"

"--You're in therapy?"

"Aren't you?"

The talk therapy boom, at least in the US, arguably seems to have started from the mid 20th century (when "shellshock"morphed into PTSD) and has just ballooned since then. I'll be the first to say I'm out of touch with current US norms, but I certainly remember the ethos of "Talk it out" even from childhood.

Also there's a narrative that everyone is broken or suffering from trauma in some form and thus EVERYONE needs 'healing' to manage their lives. And people who deny needing healing are the most broken of all! So they work from the assumption that anyone who hasn't gone to therapy must be broken, and thus therapy will help fix things... even if that person had a perfectly normal, healthy upbringing.

I say this as somebody who used therapy to get over a bad breakup. It helped me work through some things, get my emotions out, process my own role in the events and my own personal failings and then... get back to real life quicker. Its a tool! If it works, you should eventually be able to stop using it.

But end of the day it led me to conclude that I'm doing almost everything 'right' and have an accurate world model and generally a normal response to life events... and its EVERYONE ELSE who needs to get their shit together.

This Eliezer Yudkowsky tweet lives in my head rent free.

I think a lot of people use the need for therapy or the fact that they're in therapy as an excuse to not address actual life circumstances that are holding them back.

And by the same token, if their therapist isn't pushing them to address or change their life circumstances, they're probably just there to collect a check and make the person feel like they're doing something constructive.

I don't know if LLM therapists will suggest actual proactive steps to improve life circumstances.

I've mentioned this before, but I follow a few Replika subs and FB groups. These things are already being used for therapy. And while some people seem happy with their chatbot companions, a day doesn't go by when someone doesn't post, seriously distraught, that their AI girlfriend or boyfriend "cheated" on them, or didn't remember some important detail of their life, or behaved hurtfully. Some people really, genuinely think they are sentient and feeling, and some people are going to be really fucked up by relying on a chatbot for advice and human companionship.

I’m not convinced that this is worse than a human. There’s a fair number of patients of human doctors who believe that their shrink is in a relationship with them and some think they’re cheating. Keep in mind that the kind of person who would turn to therapy to fix themselves is likely someone with few friends and family to talk to and thus are putting a lot of eggs in the psychiatrist basket. That it’s going through AI is not really surprising to me.

I am reminded of the 4chan greentext about the anon who hires a prostitute to talk to about his problems because her hourly rate is cheaper than his insurance copay for a real therapist.

I've unironically done this. prostitutes tend to be very open-minded people who are also good at keeping secrets. downside is they can't really give you any meaningful advice, but i don't think that's really the point of therapy.

Plot twist: prostitute is a student/has a degree

Better yet, the prostitute is a therapist moonlighting for extra cash.

Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drums. Curtains.

There’s a Roald Dahl short story with a similarly structured (much tamer but profoundly uncomfortable) punchline.

O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” comes to mind, too, but that one is heartwarming.

Here's a map of the Presidential vote swing from 2012 to 2024:

https://x.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1860310329248325759

It makes me wonder how much of Trump's appeal to midwestern industrial workers is dependent on trade rather than a broader, cultural working-class identity. I don't think farmers in Iowa swung massively toward him because they were mad their factories were being sent to China. Ditto with the Rio Grande Valley and Miami-Dade county.

I wish that infographic could include population change on the z-axis, in addition to the voting change.

I live in an extremely blue enclave of an extremely red region, and one thing I've seen is that all the aspiring PMCs move as close to the blue enclave as they can manage, or they flee to the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC megalopolis, never to be seen again.

More people are moving from blue areas to red ones than the opposite.

I would attribute that to the population getting older in general. City life, and its progressive paeans, are more attractive to the young who seek opportunity and change. They are willing to tolerate things like noisy neighbors and the homeless because they are willing to bear that burden, even if it annoys them privately. The old and those with families wish for the reverse and move away to where they can get away from that within their financial means.

It very well may be that the blues diminish because their societal bedrocks self-select and become redder in the bargain.

It’s not just financial means. Nobody really wants to live in a downtown area of a city, because of homeless people, drugs, crime etc. unless you happen to be rich enough to afford one of the very expensive and exclusive areas of the city, you basically live with crime as an everyday reality of your life. Leaving the door of your car unlocked so thieves don’t smash it. Women carrying at least mace (because guns are illegal) and often being consigned to their homes after sunset. Using the buddy system or proactively telling people everything you’re doing so someone knows where to start looking if something happens. I can’t imagine any woman tolerating the idea of having a baby in the city if they have the means to flee somewhere safer.

If you feel consigned to your home after sunset, you're more likely to need psychiatric medication than moving boxes. On average, people are moving to cities, and aren't afraid of the dark. I've never known a city dwelling woman to carry any means of protection. Fertility rates have remained about 10% lower in large metro areas than rural areas for over a decade. Not being able to imagine something 10% less frequent is caused by a broken imagination.

I've never known a city dwelling woman to carry any means of protection.

I know plenty, counting pepperspray. Are you not an American?

I've never known a city dwelling woman to carry any means of protection.

How many women have you known the contents of the purse of when they walk around at night?

Unfortunately old comment but over the years no woman has ever mentioned carrying protection. Hundreds if not thousands of women over decades in major American cities. I've dated a dozen or so. I don't recall the idea even being mentioned, though it probably has. I moved out of the US in 2019. Crime has an absurd socioeconomic divide. My crime bubble is probably 5% of the modal white American. I grew up in a small, isolated town of decent prosperity. I'm 40ish and have never been the victim of anything other than petty crime, and even that rare. Same with my friends in all places AFAIKT. Its one data point, but its an honest perspective. So rarely have I seen crime that it is not something I think about. I'm positive it exists and am happy to pay for competent policing everywhere. Criminal (In)Justice was a good read on the geography of crime. Without any forethought, I have live where crime isn't. And now I shall knock on wood.

I live in NYC, and I've never heard of anyone living like that. I've lived here for about 8 years, and I know of exactly 1 instance of somebody I personally know being affected by street crime, and that was just a phone snatching. Maybe some women carry pepper spray, but I've never noticed it. IMO, carrying pepper spray indicates that things are pretty safe because it's not very effective against much. I do know lots of people, men and women, young and old, who have no concerns at all about walking around alone late at night, even drunk. I've never heard of anybody telling people everything they're doing in case "something happens".

I'm not really sure if car break-ins are much of a problem honestly, mostly because very few people have them, and if they do, they mostly park them in expensive private parking garages. It does seem a little surprising I guess, but I would think I would have heard of it happening at least some if it was actually common.

It is fairly common for people who want to have kids to move out, but that's more because it's quite expensive to get a large enough space, not because of concerns about crime. There definitely are a lot of kids of all ages around, including in strollers and being walked around. Enough that it's reasonably common to be mildly annoyed by someone wheeling a baby stroller around in a place that seems kind of inappropriate, like inside a crowded store.

I live in NYC, and I've never heard of anyone living like that.

You're about 30 years too late for NYC. There still are cities like that, though.

Maybe! I've lived in or visited several big cities, and never seen or heard of things like that though. It seems more plausible to me that things might be more like what Maiq described in what I guess you could call "dead cities" - the medium-small cities that used to be thriving, but all of the industries that were there left for various reasons. Most of the decent people with good life potential also left due to the lack of good jobs long before things got bad. The resulting downward spiral leads to a pretty bad place.

But then, those places are not exactly havens of progressivism, and I don't think any blue-affiliated people are going to decide to move there, which was the point of this whole thread.

Detroit and Baltimore are typical examples. Both have areas where blue-affiliated people were moving (though to enclaves), though I don't know if they still do.

I live in downtown Chicago and this does not reflect my experience. It's less that you need to be in an excessively exclusive area, just avoid the very bad areas. People actively want to live in several of the downtown clusters, especially in their youth. We'll probably move out to the burbs when we have out kid of school age for the better schools, not because we fear the area.

We'll probably move out to the burbs when we have out kid of school age for the better schools, not because we fear the area.

This is exactly the kind of problem Democrats need to solve if they want to win people back. People dont want long commutes and to move out for schools, but the reality is that if a default place requires very close oversight of a 2 year old, its not really fit for humans. If there is glass on the ground or shit, perhaps you have a dog and have had to pull them away in your neighborhood. Kids shouldnt be on leashes, they are humans that need to learn, but learning not to step in the dog shit is not so valuable a lesson for a 2 year old. Particularly when that dog shit is mixed with glass in a kids playground where, in more normal places, you can trust to just let said 2 year old march around while you enjoy a coffee.

Plus the playground bullies are out of control ATM in cities. Many biters. Cops will charge YOU if you discipline or physically separate a kid while defending your own. Particularly if the stack isn't in your favor.

And you know all this. You know "better schools" is a euphemism for better peer students and peer parents. No amount of Stuyvesant and Stevenson teachers would make Haitian kids learn. And I sure as heck know the Stevenson kids dont have any broken glass on their feeder campus.

“Downtown” / urban core parts of SF, NYC, Boston are some of the most expensive real estate in the US.

The population in New York (39) and California (37) is older than the population in Texas (median age 35). With a national median age of 38, New York is actually slightly older than the country as a whole.

However, Florida's is much higher, at about 43 (which makes sense, they are long known to be a haven for retirees!)

AFAIK median ages always include children. So any place that families go to will be much younger than a place with mostly singles, even if the singles themselves are younger.

NYT had a good article about political sorting:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/30/upshot/voters-moving-polarization.html

all the aspiring PMCs move as close to the blue enclave as they can manage

This is as much about economic opportunity as it is about cultural sorting.

In our country, we have red counties and blue cities. So someone with the talent, interest, and capability to do the sorts of high-skill jobs you need to do to get ahead in this day and age often end up having to move to a blue enclave, whether they like it or not.

There are certainly some strivers who pursue trades, or other skilled professions with more geographical flexibility. But in general, the money follows population, and the population is clustered around blue areas.

The brain drain is real. But describing it in terms of a desire to become Democratic simply doesn’t explain the cause by itself. People are just trying to provide the best livelihood they can to themselves and their families, and to do that they have to follow the money = population = density = Democratic correlation.

Anne Selzer in shambles.

But yes, I think the party realignment is largely about cultural signalling. It's not like the average Iowan is going to have a coherent opinion on trade policy.

The average swing voter sees the election as a referendum on the direction the country, with Harris representing the status quo.

I think the heavily hispanic areas swung towards Trump as a side effect of hispanics regarding themselves as having more in common with their white counterparts, leading them to vote with their coworkers and immediate bosses. This change has been more or less predictable for decades now even if most of the voices calling attention to it have done so prematurely.

Manufacturing is a surprisingly large portion of the economy in rural areas. In dollar terms, manufacturing is a larger sector of Iowa's economy than agriculture.


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